Opinions needed from shop owners and everyone

On 1/7/04 9:45 AM,"animaux" posted:

On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 20:58:00 -0500, Ellice opined:

Those are pretty much your options - either find a better shop to do
consignment with, get a written and reasonable agreement, sell your stuff
wholesale and just deal with letting the shops charge accordingly, or sell
retail directly yourself - if you have some events that are within reason
for you to attend - and you just gear up for those.

Hope that helped.
ellice

Thank you Ellice. Your suggestions are wonderfully helpful. I think I give
people the benefit of the doubt, but clearly I am being screwed and this shop
owner knows it. She has no idea how smart I am. I play dumb. I'm hardly
dumb.

You're very welcome. Glad to read that you found a sale to a shop. It's a
toss up with things like this - how much time you want to spend in the
marketing, retailing, vs the making. And shop owners are just a
cross-section of humanity - you find the good, the bad and the in-between.
When I started the little business with the idea of painting canvas, there
was plenty more to learn - I rapidly found out. Business is just handled a
bit differently than my prior world of science R&D. Just the whole thing
about labelling your pieces - and being sure that you don't put a price on
them. Furthermore - I was told not to put a phone number or the like on the
label - as shops don't want people contacting the designers directly. So,
the thing is - have a label, so LNS can write the price on the canvas
(regular price gun stickers just don't stick), have the designer name, and
that's pretty much it. Interesting. Hence, a lot of canvas designer
web-sites, like many XS designers, will have pictures of their work, but no
prices - just info about the piece, and links to shops that carry them, or a
shop that has an arrangement for referral and doing phone or web orders.

I can't believe the shop owner thought you were dumb - doing a shy, retiring
wall-flower routine? ;^) Anyhow, good luck whatever you decide for the
future with this. Send me a note off-line - if you want we could talk about
me showing some of your stuff, repping at the big needlework market in June
(not doing January - illness, conflicts in the way).

Ellice